Method and apparatus for traffic information conversion using traffic information element knowledge base

Abstract

A method and apparatus for conversion of traffic information based on traffic information element knowledge base are provided. According to the present invention, a road network is described using roads, intersections and sections as traffic information elements and a correspondence between these elements and a road topological network in a digital map is established, so that a universal traffic information describing model, which is compatible with language used in people's daily life, can be established. Further, a traffic information element knowledge base can be generated based on the roads, intersections and sections, their respective attributes and the relationship between them, to support inter-conversion between road topological network traffic information and text-based traffic information. With the universal traffic information describing model and the traffic information element knowledge base according to the present invention, it is possible to support fusion and conversion for traffic data from various sources and to support various forms of presentation and interaction for traffic information, such as presentation of traffic information on digital navigation map, textual description of traffic information, map presentation of traffic information for urban trunk roads, interaction for natural language queries of traffic information, etc.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0001]The invention relates to the field of traffic information description, and more particularly, to establishment of a traffic information describing model, generation of a traffic information element knowledge base and mutual conversions of traffic information from various traffic data sources.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]In modern society, automobiles are becoming increasingly widespread with the rapid economic growth, which imposes more and more pressures on urban traffic and causes increasingly severe traffic jams. It is advantageous to mitigate traffic congestions, so as to reduce travel time for automobile drivers, reduce fuel consumption, improve economic efficiency of a city and facilitate environment protection. Thus, the traffic information service system plays an important role in urban intelligent traffic system.[0003]With respect to traffic information gathering, the current rapid development of multi-media technology, mobile communication t...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0026]It is possible to use traffic objects compliant with language used in our daily life and based on real roads as the traffic information elements, so as to establish the correspondence between these traffic information elements and the basic constituent elements of the road topological network. Further, by establishing the traffic information describing model based on these traffic information elements, it is possible to facilitate natural language processing of the traffic information and traffic information interaction using language used in our daily life.

[0028]In a typical road topological network on an digital navigation map, a road can be divided into a number of paths and any point at which the paths intersect with each other is defined as a node. As such, in reality, an intersection at which two roads intersect with each other generally corresponds to a plurality of nodes. In the present invention, such nodes can be incorporated together by deciding whether their associated intersections have the same geographical areas or names, thereby extracting the intersection on the real roads accurately.

[0034]In this way, when the automatically generated name is incorrect or incompliant with the name used in our daily life, it is possible to manually edit the name and update the traffic information describing model.

[0036]In this way, it is possible to establish, for each of a number of types of road topological networks, a corresponding traffic information describing model and to generate a universal knowledge base based on the established models, so as to support the fusion of traffic data from different sources and / or based on different traffic maps.

[0046]In this way, it is possible to convert automatically, based on the digital navigation map, the traffic information, probed by probe vehicles for example, such as link travel speed and link travel time, into corresponding traffic information elements, such as text description-based traffic information for a particular road or intersection, so as to facilitate the distribution and interaction of the traffic information. Also, the text description-based traffic information reported from, for example, a traffic monitoring personnel can be directly converted into the road topological network traffic information corresponding to the digital navigation map, such that the traffic information can be supplemented and updated timely and conveniently.

[0048]The present invention provides many advantages including, but not limited to, the followings. It is possible to fully consider traffic information features described in our daily language, so as to provide a traffic information describing model with roads, intersections and sections being its kernel elements, and to establish a correspondence between these elements and a road topological network on an digital navigation map. The traffic information describing model as provided herein contains roads, intersections, sections and the relationship therebetween. The road nodes, road sections and various travel directions thereof can be described in detail in both text and road topological network, such that the traffic information can be described accurately and specifically. The traffic information describing model provided herein is applicable to different types of data sources for traffic information, and can fuse the traffic data from different sources to obtain a fusion result applicable to navigation systems as well as various forms of distribution and interaction for traffic information. Also, the traffic information describing model provided herein is based on traffic information element as its kernel and provides ontological objects for natural language processing of traffic information. The present invention can derive a traffic information describing model in advance, based on an digital navigation map, thereby being highly efficient in that the model can be calculated just once but reused several times. The present invention supports various specifications of digital navigation maps and is thus widely applicable. The concept of intersection containing geographical space information and turn direction, as provided herein, can effectively increase accuracy of map matching of the probe vehicle technology. Additionally, the model and its correspondence with the road topological network according to the present invention can be automatically generated by computer programs, thereby significantly improving production efficiency.

Problems solved by technology

In modern society, automobiles are becoming increasingly widespread with the rapid economic growth, which imposes more and more pressures on urban traffic and causes increasingly severe traffic jams.

In traffic information gathering, stationary probing devices deployed along the roads, such as cameras, loops and RTMS (Remote Traffic Microwave Sensor), can accurately gather data for traffic information, which is, however, limited to arterial road network in general.

The probe vehicle technology, which mainly uses taxies, can calculate traffic information for urban road network in real time, but it is subjected to objective constraints such as the number of probe vehicles.

In this case, however, information is limited in amount and also is inaccurate.

A user uploading approach, in which a driver uploads traffic information for the area where he / she is currently located to a data center via a channel provided by a mobile information service provider, suffers from limited coverage.

However, these approaches have different types of data formats, different description fashions and respective drawbacks in information completeness and accuracy.

However, such data structure is not designed for traffic information service and unable to define text description attributes for traffic information and to include the relationship between traffic information describing objects and links / nodes.

They are only directed to solve some local or one-way conversion problems, but fail to establish an intermediate model between text description-based traffic information and link-based traffic information.

Moreover, this solution is inaccurate, computationally consuming and based on necessary premises that information such as location names, bridge names, sections and intersections is included in the digital navigation map and that the operation of path matching can find a unique, correct path.

As noted above, the digital navigation map is designed for path navigation, with its kernel being road topological network, but fails to fully consider roads, locations and the like involved in traffic information.

Meanwhile, path matching usually result in a number of path options, from which it is difficult to determine which of the matched paths to be selected.

Thus, this solution is only capable of converting text description-based information into geographical space-based traffic information with a low matching rate and high computational cost.

The solution of Patent Document 2 only considers fusion but fails to consider how to provide text description-based, easily understandable traffic information for information distribution.

The solution of Non-Patent Document 1 can provide better user experience by graphically distributing traffic information, but cannot provide traffic information description in text.

Additionally, Non-Patent Document 2 does not account for the correspondence between geographical ontology of traffic information and geographical space.

They are incapable of establishing a traffic information describing model from a universal, reasonable and efficient perspective and globally considering the description of traffic information, including the traffic information elements to be defined, the relationship between these elements and the relationship between these elements and geographical space.

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